Everson v. Board of Education

Everson v. Board of Education is a 1947 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that addressed the application of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. The case concerned a New Jersey program that reimbursed parents for the cost of transporting their children to school, including students attending Catholic parochial schools, and a taxpayer challenged the reimbursement as an unconstitutional use of public funds to support religion. Writing for a five justice majority, Justice Hugo Black articulated a broad reading of the Establishment Clause, describing a wall of separation between church and state drawn from Thomas Jefferson's writings, yet the Court ultimately upheld the New Jersey program as a general welfare measure benefiting schoolchildren rather than religious institutions directly. Everson marked the first time the Supreme Court applied the Establishment Clause to state and local governments through incorporation under the Fourteenth Amendment, and its language became a foundational reference point for later church-state litigation even as the Court's own application of the doctrine in the case itself proved narrower than its rhetoric.